AI Weekly Malaysia

Simon Willison published Photo Scrubber, an experimental browser tool that automatically detects and blurs faces and strips metadata from photos. He built it with GPT-6 Astra after taking a photograph of protesters and deciding he did not want to share images of strangers with identifiable faces. The detection stack is Google's MediaPipe C++ library compiled to WebAssembly via @mediapipe/tasks-vision, running the BlazeFace face detection model.

Why: It is a working example of face detection running entirely in the browser via MediaPipe WASM, which means photos are never uploaded to a server — useful if you publish images containing bystanders or clients and do not want to route them through a third-party API. The post gives no accuracy numbers or false-negative rate, so treat auto-blur as a first pass you verify by eye before publishing anything, not as anonymisation. The reusable part is the stack choice: @mediapipe/tasks-vision plus BlazeFace is a small, self-hostable detection path you can drop into your own upload pipeline.

A satirical blog post (dated Sept 28, 2026, ~6 min read) argues LinkedIn's feed is dominated by near-identical computer-vision demo posts — hand-tracking webcam tricks and a pothole-detection project — which the author says are either tutorial-derived or vibecoded, and which in the pothole case 'is not sending it to anything.' As a counter-move, the author describes building a 'YOLO Post Detector' aimed at the '🚀 Excited to announce...' style of post. The Hacker News thread drew 270 points and 222 comments.

Why: If you are building a portfolio or launch demo to post publicly, this piece gives a concrete differentiation test rather than a vibe check: does the output go somewhere? The author singles out the pothole detector because it only displays a detection locally instead of feeding an API or downstream action — the same criticism would apply to any hand-tracking or object-detection demo that ends at a bounding box on screen. Decide now whether your next demo has a consumer of its output (an alert, a ticket, a dashboard, a dataset) or is just a webcam effect, because the audience this piece represents can no longer tell them apart. Note: the text contains no Malaysian or Southeast Asian angle, so there is no local policy, funding, or infrastructure impact to draw from it.

Wabi, the prompt-to-app startup founded by Eugenia Kuyda (who previously founded Replika), announced 'Wabi 2.0' on September 28 — an invite-only AI messenger that generates the interface it needs in the moment, rather than competing head-on with other vibe-coding tools. Kuyda's stated rationale is that chat-only agents degrade with use because history and ongoing tasks end up buried in one endless scroll. The pivot lands the same week OpenAI's Dev Day announced updated ChatGPT plugins, which let apps offer interactive experiences inside ChatGPT with the app name pinned more visibly in the sidebar.

Why: If you ship a vibe-coded app or an agent product, this is a fork in the road: build your own messenger-style surface that generates UI on demand, or distribute inside ChatGPT's sidebar via the updated plugins and trade control for reach. The article gives no pricing, launch date beyond 'invite-only', or user numbers for Wabi 2.0, and no technical detail on how the generated interfaces work — so treat it as a positioning signal, not a validated playbook. Nothing here is Malaysia-specific.

The submitted text for this Ars Technica piece contains no article content — only cookie-consent boilerplate covering social media, essential, targeted, performance, functional, and audience measurement cookies. The only substantive information available is the headline, which claims NASA 'squeezed Treasury,' 'vibe coded,' and 'broke the mold' in a bid to save the Swift observatory, described as a failed mission. No figures, dates, names, quotes, technical details, or outcomes from the actual reporting are present in the text provided.

Why: There is nothing here a builder can act on. You cannot extract what NASA actually did, what 'squeezed Treasury' means procedurally, what was vibe coded, what it cost, or why a failed mission is being celebrated — none of that appears in the supplied text. Anyone wanting to discuss this needs the real article body first; treating the headline as fact would be repeating an unverified claim.